OpenPetra 0.3.0 News Update
Releases:
- OpenPetra Alpha 0.3.0 was released on July 24th, 2014.
The release contains a lot of new functionality and bug fixes! It can be downloaded from here. A Windows installer is available.
OpenPetra becomes more and more mature. Therefore we have decided to work closely together with one particular OM office, which is OM Switzerland. Thankfully OM Switzerland has taken on the role of becoming a test and trial site for our project. They have agreed to help us with their expertise to complete missing functionalities in OpenPetra so that it fits their needs.
Although some features will just be specifically designed for them, other OM offices will benefit from improved usability, too. The input of OM Switzerland already helped us to improve the interaction between components to make the workflow smooth and intuitive.
OpenPetra has received more testing than ever. Many problems that were identified by the testers got addressed and have been solved. As a result the application is more stable overall and we increased OpenPetras’ version number to 0.3.0 to indicate that. Still, any use of the application at this stage must be seen as ‘experimental’.
Major improvements in this version
Filter/Find Implementation
• The Accounts Payable screens and the Extract Maintenance screens are finished.
• Filter/Find implementation is essentially complete across the whole of OpenPetra.
Keyboard Shortcuts
• A number of standard keyboard shortcuts to aid in navigating around the main parts of any OpenPetra screen have been implemented. There is even a help screen to remind the users what the shortcuts are (launched via the Help Menu).
Gift Destination
• Gift Destination settings in the Partner Edit screen now determine the Field that the money is sent to. This is closely linked to the Commitment Records in the Personnel Module.
Partner/Personnel
• The Address Tab on the Partner Edit screen has been re-written so that it now complies with OpenPetra standards in terms of coding as well as user experience.
• Search for Bank Details in the Partner Find screen has been implemented.
• A new screen to browse through Short Term and Long Term Applications has been added.
Finance
• The Ledger Setup has been improved.
• The Gift Entry system is enhanced by a global search function for gifts.
• Donor and Recipient history is now accessible from the gift entry screen.
• The last Transaction is loaded as soon as the donor is entered, which makes data entry easier for regular gifts.
• In the General Ledger, Transactions can now be imported into an empty Journal.
Technical Notes:
At the moment the public forum is unavailable as SourceForge has discontinued hosting this service and we haven’t swapped to a different provider yet. However, issues can be reported via email using info@openpetra.org and will be dealt with.
Web Services
Some time was taken up with contributing to the work to replace the current client-server communication layer with Web Services. However, we have decided to shelve this for the time being.
NB: For advanced testing of OpenPetra we recommend to run it with PostgreSQL as database system rather than SQLite, which this demo runs by default.
Thank you for your interest and support,
ChristianK for the OpenPetra developers